Kazakhs Shrug at 'Borat' While the State Fumes

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Published: September 28, 2006

There is no Running of the Jews here. No one greets you with the expression ''Jagshemash,'' which is either nonsense, garbled Polish or mangled Czech; it's hard to say. The country's national drink is not made from horse urine, though fermented horse milk, or kumys, is considered a delicacy. (It tastes like effervescent yogurt.)

There is almost nothing, in short, remotely truthful in the satiric depiction of Kazakhstan popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian who plays a bumbling, boorish, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic Kazakh television reporter named Borat Sagdiyev.

And yet Borat -- Mr. Cohen, that is -- has managed to infuriate and confound the country's officials. Their attempts to respond, to set the record straight, have resulted only in more attention here, where Borat's antics, shown on British and American television and on the Internet, now make the rounds like samizdat from the long-gone days when the country was part of the Soviet Union.

''You mean Ali G?'' Artyom Artyukhov, an 18-year-old student, said in a sleek new coffeehouse in Almaty, the country's commercial center, referring to Mr. Cohen's ''Ali G Show,'' where Borat first emerged to haunt this proud, prickly Central Asian nation. ''A friend from the United States brought me a disc.''

Now Mr. Cohen has a feature-length film, opening Nov. 3 in the United States, called ''Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,'' with a title as malapropos as Borat's sendup of Kazakhstan as a backward land of poverty, prostitution and bigotry.

And Kazakhstan's government is flustered all over again. That the film had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this month in advance of a visit to the United States this week by the country's president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, only made matters worse, and a denunciation by the Kazakh Embassy in Washington led to a flurry of newspaper articles asserting -- wrongly, the embassy said -- that Mr. Nazarbayev intended to complain about ''Borat'' to President Bush. The embassy has said the country will continue to portray itself in a more positive light with television commercials and newspaper advertisements, like the one that appeared yesterday in The New York Times.

The foreign ministry spokesman, Yerzhan N. Ashykbayev, said in an interview here in Astana, the country's capital, that ''what we are concerned about is that Kazakhstan -- terra incognita for many in the West -- is depicted in this way.''

Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen's performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country's president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of ''someone's political order'' to denigrate Kazakhstan and that the government ''reserved the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of this kind.''

Mr. Cohen, who is Jewish, responded, as Borat, in a video posted on his Web site, citing Mr. Ashykbayev by name and declaring that he ''fully supported my government's decision to sue this Jew.''

''Since the 2003 Tulyakov reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world,'' he goes on in the video, citing fictional details in the absurdly stilted English that is central to his act. ''Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to 8 years old.''

But it was the Foreign Ministry's complaint that gave some in the country's news media a chance to report on it, and that was when most Kazakhs first learned that a faraway British comedian had turned the world's attention to their country.

In an atmosphere of legal constraints on press freedoms, if not outright censorship, the ministry's statement offered a way to poke fun at Mr. Nazarbayev's near-absolute political power, at least indirectly, by showing what the fuss was all about.

''There is an unwritten rule that the president's personality is never criticized,'' said Baryz Bayen, a correspondent and editor for TV 31, a privately owned channel in Almaty.

Last fall Mr. Bayen prepared a six-minute feature on the controversy over Mr. Cohen's MTV performance that included clips of the skit depicting Mr. Nazarbayev, borrowed from Russia's NTV channel. Mr. Bayen cited a history of political satire dating to Moli? and recalled an old refrain from Soviet times: ''I have never read Solzhenitsyn, but I condemn him absolutely.''

''I do not feel any false patriotism,'' said Mr. Bayen, who, like all ethnic Kazakhs, bears no resemblance to Borat whatsoever. ''I saw portions of his show, and I can say it is funny.''

TV 31's executive producer, Yevgeny Grundberg, said he hoped to send a correspondent to interview Mr. Cohen in character, reversing the roles in Borat's acts, where his mock interviews have duped some subjects. So far, though, Mr. Cohen has not responded to his offer. He said Mr. Cohen's satire was hyperbolic at best and wildly off the mark at worst but nonetheless served as an antidote to the articles and broadcasts that appear in official state media, where Kazakhstan is forever harmonious and prosperous.

''Most people take it normally,'' he said, noting that those who have seen Borat remain a minority with access to the Internet or satellite television, where ''Da Ali G Show'' appears on Russian MTV, which is on cable television here. ''The nation has changed enough for that.''

Perhaps not. ''Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'' will almost certainly not appear in Kazakhstan's movie theaters, Mr. Ashykbayev said. He added that law-enforcement agencies would do everything within their power to restrict the film's importation into the country, as well as the legal distribution of its DVD.

After Mr. Cohen's MTV appearance last fall the Kazakh authorities stripped his site of its original domain name, .kz. Even Mr. Nazarbayev's daughter, Dariga, criticized that step, saying in an interview with one of the newspapers she owns that Borat's site ''damaged our image much less than its closure.'' In fact it now appears at www.borat.tv and remains accessible here.

Borat's act is a matter of taste, here as elsewhere. Kseniya Udod, an editor who works for Astana, a television channel here owned by the state's energy company, KazMunaiGaz, called it ''humor below the waist.''

At the same time she noted the altogether different reaction in Finland to a running gag by Conan O'Brien, the host of NBC's ''Late Night,'' based on his supposed resemblance to that country's president, Tarja Halonen. Mr. O'Brien was warmly welcomed there when he visited in February following Ms. Halonen's re-election.

Mr. Nazarbayev's presidency, by contrast, is autocratic and tolerates little public criticism.

''The government is young,'' Ms. Udod said. ''Maybe we take these things more painfully.''

Photo: Sacha Baron Cohen plays the title character in the comedy ''Borat.'' (Photo by 20th Century Fox)(pg. E4)